Fun Fire Science Interesting stuff

Description

Building a fire is more than it looks like, there are many things that happen that we cannot see. Understanding how fire works makes building it easier, especially in challenging conditions, practice really helps as well. Video produced by http://wildernessinnovation.com

Tags: fire,training,survival,skills,camp,hike,outdoors,hunt,supplies

Video Transcription

well this is perry peacock with wilderness innovation and today we're going to do something starting into some training series that are going to evolve over time and today's subject we're going to talk about fire what I'm going to do the typical fire thing that you see we're going to be a little more detail AB some illustrations and try to show you some of the scale of what's involved in fire and we're going to talk a little bit about the science of fire okay fire we talk about fire it's an exothermic reaction and once fire starts once you get that reaction started fire keeps going

alright and talking about fire I'm sure everybody has seen the triangle of fire so let's let's look at that real quickly here okay so right now we're going to spend just a moment with the fire triangle not going to spend too much time with it because I'm sure everybody's seen it but basically what we're saying is if you don't have a complete triangle you don't have fire if we don't run out of fuel the fire goes out if we starve the fire for oxygen the fire goes out or if we drop the heat enough that there's not enough heat to sustain it and the fire goes out now all those ingredients must be present in order for a fire to start the fire is a chemical reaction

I can take my double bear good lighter and I can put it on this log here this piece of wood not really allowed but just a little piece of maple that's about been sitting in my firebox for about a year so alright building a building a fire happens in stages we started we started a certain point and we work up towards it starting a fire takes a little bit of planning and organization and and that's how at least that's how successful fireworks

okay so now to analyze why we weren't able to get fire with this but just scorch the wood let's look at a few factors here this lighter the butane in the lighter burns at about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit we know that cellulose what wood is pretty much composed of will burn on average around 450 degrees Fahrenheit so if we've got 3,000 degrees and it only takes four fifty to ignite the wood then why didn't the would start but this is the average piece of wood shows what it's made up of this blue section down here is carbon this greenish band right here is showing this is the layer showing how much oxygen is in an equivalent amount of wood and then up here is this band here this kind of oranges band is how much water is in wood and then this very top layer here is hydrogen that's about how much hydrogen is in the wood okay this little bundle of wood ways darn near exactly 10 pounds and that's what we're going to use for our illustrations on this video today is 10 pounds of wood i'm going to show you what it takes to burn this wood and what's involved so in this 10 pounds of wood right here there are two pounds of water this court bottle right here two pounds of water in this wood this season dry wood still has that much water in it 10 pounds of wood also has four pounds of carbon so that's our carbon back here we've got three and a half pounds of oxygen in there and we've also got so we've got our two pounds of water and we've got about a half a pound of hydrogen so that's what's in this 10 pounds of firewood right here that's what it's made up of what it consists of okay so I'm going to take just an ordinary of paper drinking cup and you know if you throw that thing in the fire by itself that thing will burn pretty pretty quick but let's say that I pour some water in that thing yeah tot okay there's our cup sitting there in the fire and it's burned off above the water line but down below the waterline look it's not even it's not even discolored but look at that rolling boil in it that water is just hotter than blazes but you know how hot can water get depends on the pressure of course but to 12 your boiling point maybe maybe depending on conditions you might get it a little hotter than that but not much but how hot do we have now how hot do we have to get that that paper right there to burn the papers got to be around 400 degrees to burn and we can't get that as long as the waters in there you know there's no way that you're going to start a fire with a piece of wood that has too much moisture in it and so that's the first thing is we want to make get fine dry wood we want to get fine very fine tinder so that we can apply a little bit of heat and get enough heat in there where we can evaporate off the moisture that's in the little tiny fine pieces you know if it's really fine like that we can evaporate that moisture out very quickly and we can get a fire to start and we can gradually go to step 2 add more bigger pieces of wood and just build it from there

all right now we were not able to burn this piece of wood with a 3000 degree butane flame and our and the reason why as we just showed you the moisture in the wood has to be burned off and one thing to think about is even though you're scorching the outside here inside of that those cells have still have water in them and that moist you're on the inside if it can't escape very well then then it's going to absorb a lot of the heat you're putting on to here and prevent this from burning so the way that we can deal with that is take like I've shown right here and just takin some take some list just some fine shavings and something like that right there will light pretty readily and now because there's oxygen all all in and around all those shavings and the shavings are very fine we're able to apply the heat to a very small area a lot of heat to a small area which causes it to vaporize the water very quickly and once that's done then the cellulose the wood fibers can burn and we can get a fire started so let's just illustrate that right here notice how fast that thing flames all I know it took was about a half a second of flame this thing is going and so you see once that process is started now we could feed this fire and this fire will keep going we've started a chemical reaction okay now what I want to do is I'm taking this 10 pounds of wood so this this structure right here represents over a thousand cubic feet of air that it takes to burn this 10 pounds of firewood so I'm right here in the very back corner and you can see over 10 feet high that's what it takes to get enough air to supply the oxygen needed to burn just that little 10-pound bundle of firewood you

this is perry peacock with wilderness innovation talking to you about fire it's exciting have a great day